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Using FoxReplace as a learning aid. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 2727 days ago 104 posts - 27 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 1 of 18 13 March 2010 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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After reading an article on AJATT about how he mixed his languages as a transitional device between learning and fluency, and it got me thinking about how to utilize this. I don't have any friends who are studying the same languages that I am, so I don't have much of an opportunity to mix languages for this kind of practice, but I found a Firefox plug-in that could work for this idea called FoxReplace. You basically create a dictionary file that replaces words displayed on the web pages you visit with another word you specify, so you can do things like replace "I think" with "Я снаю".
Of course, you can't feed it grammar rules, verb conjugations, noun inflections, etc. so you have to think about difficult words, such as anything that is inflected. This isn't terribly compatible with the English language, so some languages would work better than others for this and it would depend on what language(s) you read in, but I think it could be a nice tool to sort of 'force' yourself into a remember-by-exposure environment, such as helping to remember problem words or practice reading a foreign script without having to put forth the effort of using an SRS. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 2345 days ago 616 posts - 124 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 18 14 March 2010 at 5:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, that looks really cool. I'm gonna check it out!
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3393 days ago 2608 posts - 2293 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 18 14 March 2010 at 10:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Look good, too bad nobody created anything similar for Chrome yet...
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 2934 days ago 4400 posts - 3257 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 18 14 March 2010 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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It really depends on the language though, doesn't it?
I wouldn't like to try mechanically replacing nouns in English with Russian ones because of the lack of case marking in English -- this only encourages getting stuck with the old "dictionary word" problem where you can recall the "plain" (nominative) noun easily but find it impossible to decline in normal use. | |||
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 2727 days ago 104 posts - 27 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 5 of 18 14 March 2010 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, it really does depend on both the language you're studying and the language you're reading in. For example, if you're reading Russian and learning English, it would work much better; most instances of the Russian nouns can be replaced with the comparatively small amount of English noun declinations. But the lack of inflecting in English doesn't directly translate well to Russian in many cases, nouns in particular. For English readers, Mandarin comes to mind as a really good language to use with this. Mandarin has nearly no conjugation to speak of and you could very easily replace most nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Prepositions and pronouns would be harder but still possibly doable. So it requires some thinking on the user's part; if I replaced "I have" with "у меня", are there any situations where the translation would be incorrect? Yes, such as in phrases like "I have gone to the store." So you can't just blindly add new words into FoxReplace, you need to carefully consider how well the direct translation works so you don't end up feeding yourself incorrect information. So this works best I feel as a "retain by repeated exposure" tool, not as a "learn grammar rules by reading native text" tool such as sentence mining. | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 3461 days ago 497 posts - 62 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 18 14 March 2010 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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What suggestions would you all have for nouns? I'm leafing through my frequency dictionary, adding words...and I'm wondering how I should tackle the noun gender problem. Should I replace "Einigung" mit "einigung" or "einigung(f)"? Also, how can one figure the case problem? There is a box that says "match case", but I don't think this means grammatical case. Edited by Kugel on 14 March 2010 at 10:21pm | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 2934 days ago 4400 posts - 3257 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 18 15 March 2010 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Case in "match case" means UPPER CASE vs lower case. Which is also a problem with German....
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| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 2727 days ago 104 posts - 27 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 8 of 18 15 March 2010 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
Match Case only applies to matching the entry. Whatever capitalization you use in the replacement entry is what will be shown. |
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